When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed;
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

It’s simply not possible to cheer for the brigade commander who shoots a Palestinian teenager, and then be shocked by settlers who throw a firebomb at an inhabited house.

Israelis stab gay people and burn children. There isn’t a shred of slander, the slightest degree of exaggeration, in this dry description. True, these are the actions of a few. True, too, that their numbers are increasing. It’s true that all of them – all the murderers, everyone who torches, who stabs, who uproots trees – are from the same political camp. But the opposing camp also shares the blame.

All those who thought that it would possible to sustain islands of liberalism in the sea of Israeli fascism were shown up this weekend, once and for all. It’s simply not possible to cheer for the brigade commander who shoots a teenager, and then be shocked by the settlers who set a family on fire; to support gay rights, and hold a founding conference in Ariel; to be enlightened, and then pander to the right and seek to partner with it. Evil knows no bounds; it begins in one place and quickly spreads in every direction.

The first breeding ground of those who torched the Dawabsheh family was the Israel Defense Forces, even if the offenders didn’t serve in it. When the killing of 500 children in the Gaza Strip is legitimate, and doesn’t even compel a debate, a moral reckoning, then what’s so terrible about setting a house on fire, together with its inhabitants? After all, what’s the difference between lobbing a fire bomb and dropping a bomb? In terms of the intention, or the intent, there is no difference.

When the shooting of Palestinians becomes an almost daily occurrence – two more have already been killed since the family was burned: one in the West Bank, another on the border of the Gaza Strip – who are we to complain about the fire throwers in Duma? When the lives of Palestinians are officially the army’s for the taking, their blood cheap in the eyes of Israeli society, then settler militias are also permitted to kill them. When the IDF’s ethic in the Gaza Strip is that it is permitted to do anything in order to save one soldier, who are we to complain about right-wingers like Baruch Marzel, who told me this weekend it was permissible to kill thousands of Palestinians in order to protect a single hair from the head of a Jew. Such is the atmosphere, such is the result. Original responsibility for it goes to the IDF.

No less to blame, of course, are the governments and politicians who vie with each other over who can suck up the most to the settlers. Whoever gives them 300 new homes in exchange for their violence at the flagship settlement of Beit El is telling them not only that violence is permissible, but also that it pays. It is already hard to draw the line between throwing bags of urine at police officers and fire bombs into people’s homes.

Also to blame, of course, are the law enforcement authorities, starting with the Judea and Samaria District Police – the most ridiculous and scandalous of all police districts, and not by chance. Nine Palestinian homes were torched in the past three years, according to B’Tselem. How many people have been prosecuted? None. So what happened in Duma on Friday? The fire was simply better, in the eyes of the arsonists and their minions.

Their minions also include the silent, the forgiving and all those who think the evil will remain forever within the confines of the West Bank. Their minions also include the Israelis who are convinced that the People of Israel is the chosen people, and as a result is permitted to do anything – including torching the homes of non-Jews, with their inhabitants inside.

So, too, many of those who were shocked by the act, including figures who have visited the victims in Sheba Medical Center, outside Tel Aviv – the president, the prime minister, the opposition leader and their aides – imbibed the racist, infuriating “You have chosen us from all the peoples” with their mothers’ milk.

At the end of a terrible day, it is this that leads to the burning of families whom God did not choose. No principle in Israeli society is more destructive, or more dangerous, than this principle. Nor, unfortunately, more common. If you were to examine closely what is concealed beneath the skin of most Israelis, you would find: the chosen people. When that is a fundamental principle, the next torching is only a matter of time.

Their minions are everywhere, and most of them are now tsk-tsking and expressing dismay at what happened. But what occurred couldn’t have not happened; what happened was dictated by the needs of reality, the reality of Israel and its value system. What happened will happen again, and no one will be spared. We all torched the Dawabsheh family.

A lethal product of Israel’s settlements

The killing of a Palestinian baby, who was burned to death by a firebomb thrown into his home, was no bolt from the blue.

In his testimony before the commission of inquiry into the 1994 massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, then-army Chief of Staff Ehud Barak argued that the crime of Baruch Goldstein struck the Israel Defense Forces “like a bolt from the blue”; in other words, the slaughter that Goldstein carried out could not have been predicted, and thus foiled, and therefore no one in Israel’s political or military leadership was responsible for it. The Shin Bet security services also had its excuses, starting with the challenge of “the single attacker,” who strikes without the preliminary signs that an organization would give.

The murder of Ali Dawabsheh in Duma early Friday morning was no bolt from the blue. The fire that consumed Ali and injured his family in their sleep was ignited long before and could be seen for miles, like a flare on a dark night. It was not a single attacker who fire-bombed Palestinian civilians, and it was not the first incident of its kind, even though until now the results have been less lethal.

If a commission of inquiry is appointed to look into the terror attack in Duma, it will easily note the negligence of the Jewish division of the Shin Bet security service and the nationalist crimes unit of the Judea and Samaria District Police in eliminating the disease of Jewish terror in the territories.

The search for the responsible parties must reach very high, to Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen and, most of all, to Benjamin Netanyahu himself, because the Shin Bet is directly subordinate to the prime minister, who dictates its priorities and its resources, and also because the premier is supposed to orchestrate all of the security and intelligence agencies. If the incident was a terror attack, and the Shin Bet is responsible for preventing terror, then the ultimate responsibility of the government and the executive branches is clear.

But just as Goldstein did not actually act alone, but rather within an atmosphere that was hostile to the peace process and hospitable to stopping it using any means possible, and just as Yigal Amir set out to kill Yitzhak Rabin against a background of sympathetic rabbis and ideology, so too was this fire ignited by incitement and, even more so, by deflection.

The loud denunciations of Ali Dawabsheh’s murder distract attention from the fundamental fact that Jewish settlement in the territories is the mother of all sins. It stains the morality of Israeli society and undermines the universal legitimacy that Israel enjoyed, and still enjoys, within its legal borders.

The differences between the “legitimate” settlement blocs and the “hilltop youth” are imaginary and deceptive, even to part of Israel’s center-left. Both of them, together with their ultranationalist counterparts on the Palestinian side, exacerbate and perpetuate this bloody conflict. As long as an honest and courageous leadership that recognizes this fact does not rise up in Israel, Israelis and Palestinians alike will be struck be more bolts and flares, crimes and catastrophes. As long as the settlements continue to wreak their terror and enslave Israel to their violent vision, the bloodshed will not cease.